Monday 10 August 2015

An Open Letter to A-Level Students



Dear Student,

In a couple of days all the waiting will be over.  You will receive a piece of paper with several numbers and letters that are supposed to define you.  From the age of four you have been in education, spent hours doing homework and group projects, making mind maps for revision in multi-coloured fine liners, had late nights or early mornings finishing coursework.  Finally, you sat down to a wobbly desk in an exam hall to scribble answers to questions that someone decided was the best way to allocate you a grade at the end of the whole ordeal.

The exam paper may have included all the topics you revised thoroughly and a question just like one you had practiced in class.  Or, it might have been full of questions that were nothing like the past papers.  You promised yourself you’d go over ionisation later but didn’t have time and now there’s a question on it worth eight marks.  There was so much in the syllabus that your teacher only briefly went over chapter three of ‘The Great Gatsby’ as they didn’t think it would come up, and now you’re being asked to write about how the glamour of the 1920s is being represented in this chapter for the next forty minutes.

Finally, when the clock signifies the end of the exam, your paper is taken from you and you can no longer do anything.  Who knows where your paper will end up?  The maker might love or loathe your style of writing and mark your essay accordingly.  They might have been marking for hours and tallied up your marks wrong.  The exam board could respond to pressures about “exams getting easier” and raise the grade boundaries. Do they realise your university place could depend on them giving you the benefit of the doubt on a question or merely marking fairly? 

You might have spent hours adding up UMS marks and working out what you need in the exam to get the grade you want.  Debating whether it’s worth retaking a module or if you really had done your best the first time round.  Maybe you’ll get a better question next time round, a kinder marker or maybe you’re just not good enough.  A single letter is supposed to define you.  Label you and dictate what you can do after leaving school. 

I want you to know you are good enough.  You worked hard and should get the grades you deserve.  Sometimes you can’t control the end result of hours studying, cramming and crying over textbooks.  You have to look back at how far you’ve come and what you’ve learnt.  Not just those equations and passages of French you memorised, but the friends you’ve made and how much more you are capable of now.  You have the skills to study anything you want and teach yourself.  You have had opportunities many others will never get and now many more in the future because you have had an education. 

Whatever that piece of paper says, it does not define who you are.  University offers are even done online initially, not even worthy of a print out.  I hope that everything goes in your favour on results day.  You’ve earned it.  You’ll notice that everyone wishes you “good luck”.  There’s only so far hard work can take you with exams, so I hope luck is on your side.  If it isn’t, please don’t feel like the world is crashing down around you. You can still go to university or get that placement.  There are other options available to you.  School is all you’ve really known up to this point so results seem like the most important thing.  I promise that if you look back in a few years’ time, you’ll wonder what you got so stressed about.  Remember that you are good enough and your education is worth far more than that piece of paper.

Best of luck,


Jenny

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